I know you're responding to the single point as a conversational thing, but it gives a collective theory of: teenagers mucking around, who have enough money that throwing away a $10k+ experimental drone is no issue, and they just happen to live near an air force base where there are definitely no actual experimental drones being tested. My issue then with that is that the modern teenager typically films things for credibility, and this sort of stunt isn't going to be very satisfying at night. (I fly drones. Flying at night, I try to get the footage I'm paid for and then land.)

IMO, either the story as reported has been exaggerated in many dimensions (altitude above the chopper, size of drone, time in the air, distance before landing) or it's something from the air force base that's not commercially available.

Thanks, both for your insight and the way you presented it :-)

And yes, you are right that I'm only talking about young people playing games with police/military and I don't have any idea if this is feasible or not.

But it could be a demo flight to prove to cartels this drone tech is above the law. "Look, we flew circles around a police bird and casually strolled into military airspace, imagine what we could do if we tried".